Press

Press

Hype Magazine Feature, Dubai

Dubai connection: I grew up between Bahrain, Saudi
Arabia and Dubai, so I’ve been back and forth between the three most of my
life. This time around, I’m starting my fourth year living in Dubai.

Chasing the dream: I’m the drummer for The
Boxtones. I’m very lucky that my passion is also my full-time job. We also
started our own company, The Boxtones FZE, in February 2013, and I’m Managing Partner.
We cover the corporate side of the music and all five band members have
positions within the company as well as being full-time musicians.

The journey: I started drumming when I was ten,
and have played in a multitude of line-ups in the past 21 years. My brother and
I formed a three-piece rock band called Fuse in Bahrain when I was a teenager.
When I finished school, we moved to London in search of the elusive ‘record
deal’. Our music then took us to Edinburgh, Scotland, where we lived for six
years and I also worked for a Cèilidh band at the weekends. After what felt
like too long in the UK we formed The Boxtones and headed for Bahrain to start
our career working contracts in five-star hotels. This allowed us to travel all
over the world and is what initially brought us to Dubai. Last February, we
decided we wanted to work for ourselves and focus on our original music and
hence the start of The Boxtones FZE.

Proudest moment: I think one of my proudest moments
was when The Boxtones won Rolling Stone magazine’s Street To Stage Competition
last year with our original music. We were up against more than 2,000 Gulf-wide
acts and it was tough competition.

Inspiration: I find the busier we are as a band,
the more inspired I become. The more shows we’re doing and projects we’re
getting involved in reminds me why I love playing music and how lucky I am to
work with the other four nutters in The Boxtones!

My Dubai: Dubai has no shortage of opportunities
for us so that’s why we chose to set up camp here.

On the horizon: We’re playing an acoustic gig,
Metronome, at Urban Bites in Abu Dhabi on October 18, and we’ll be playing all
the tracks from our debut album, In The
Pockets Of Clowns, over two days of Gulf Bike Week on October 30 and
November 31.

Girls’ talk: Of course, I also recommend checking
out our front-woman Louise Peel, plus Olivia Middleton who is a jewellery
designer and fashion consultant at Lola Designs; Tamara Vogel who has recently
become an instructor and started her own yoga classes; Georgina Enzer who has
just started Rocktane Management & Events as a band booker/PR; and my old
schoolmate and clever businesswoman Payal Patel-Tejani, who is co-founder of
Fashlink.